Winches are valuable tools. Winches help get people unstuck or lift loads. A winch winds a line around a drum. Typically, winches have little to no management of how the cable winds on the drum. Most interaction with the winch cable is traditionally done by hand. On a traditional winch, a user will generally need to disengage the winch drum from the winch gearbox by pulling a lever and entering a “free-spool” mode. A user will then pull the line to unspool the cable from the winch drum by hand.
If a user were to try and unspool the line by pushing the out button, the drum would spin, without the line coming off the drum. Instead, the line would begin to loosen on the drum and become a tangled mess.
Guiding the line back onto the winch drum of traditional winches is also done by hand. If the line is not coiled in an organized even way, with no gaps between the coils of line, the line may not fit on the drum. Additionally, without organized even coiling the line is likely to become tangled the next time it is unspooled. It can be dangerous to guide the line onto the winch drum by hand because debris can get caught in the line and cause damage to a user's hand.
A winch can be damaged when it is overloaded. An overloaded winch will often create excessive heat which can damage the motor, gearbox or winch line. This can then lead to the winch line snapping, thus causing damage to the vehicle the winch is attached to as well as surrounding people.